


Damosel Passing Fair

by x_los



Category: Blake's 7
Genre: F/M, Genderswap, Season/Series 02
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-29
Updated: 2015-06-29
Packaged: 2018-04-06 19:31:59
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4233987
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/x_los/pseuds/x_los
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Since joining the Liberator crew, Avon has found himself constantly worrying about Blake's safety, and has saved Blake numerous times from ludicrously dangerous situations. It's not Avon's fault that this looks like chivalry, which he doesn't believe in any more than he believes in Blake's cause, and which Blake has never had much use for.</p><p>(an AU where Blake has always been a woman)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Damosel Passing Fair

**Author's Note:**

> Beta'd by aralias

Once, very early on in their acquaintance, he'd tried addressing Blake by her first name. Like Vila, like Jenna. He'd known it was a power-play as he was doing it--he'd been questioning one of her decisions. Testing the limits.

"You are ignoring the facts, Roj."

“Oh, I don't think so, Kerr," she'd responded without hesitation, continuing on to outline her plan decisively. Her tone had been simultaneously dismissive and warm--as usual. In her mouth, under her pronunciation, his own first name had traces of 'care' and a hard edge of 'cur'. She sounded like she was addressing her favorite hunting dog, who was playing up and forgetting his place. The way she said his name was intolerable. She'd known exactly what he was doing, and had not felt even slightly threatened by it. He felt like he was being backhanded and liking it.

He'd never tried that again.

He'd only ever made a similar mistake with her once. In another disagreement, he'd accused Blake of being hysterical. Blake had raised an eyebrow.

“Like a little girl, Avon?” she’d asked, her fire draining away, as though this didn’t merit the towering disdain she could at times summon.

"You are angry, and I believe you to be acting irrationally because of this," Avon had corrected himself. "When I remonstrate with you it is, of course, exclusively about your decisions themselves." Criticizing Blake for the wrong things would be inexact--it wouldn't help them survive, and it wouldn't help Blake understand how specifically she needed to rethink her actions (or think about them for the first time).

"Good," Blake had said with a wry smile. "That, of course, makes it infinitely better when you resist every move I make."

Avon had grinned back at her. "Doesn't it."

"Well," Blake had said, her eyes bright, "at least I can tell myself, 'Avon isn't a sexist. Simply a Blakeist.'"

"Precisely." He'd realized he was properly beaming at her now, and tried to reign it in. This was Blake, after all. And it was terribly easy to flirt with Blake, but he really, really shouldn't. Flirting with someone you were in love with was a dangerous proposition at the best of times. When that person was Blake--clever, dedicated to a dangerous political agenda and hardly aware Avon existed, unless he was making her inescapably conscious of the fact by pointing out something urgent about said agenda--it was liable to turn revealing and eviscerating in an instant.

Blake always surprised him. Often unfavorably. When she’d given up their hold over the _London_ , for example, for the sake of the other prisoners. But he hadn’t known her well then. Looking back on it, he wondered that he’d ever failed to see that it was precisely what Blake would do: she could not have done anything else and remained herself. Even now, when he knew her better, she still proved difficult to predict. Avon hadn’t expected her to pull that series of stunts regarding Horizon, or to understand that he’d found Meegat’s worship disturbing without so much as talking to him about it. He was never prepared for how easily she turned his barbs, so deftly and lightly that people wouldn’t necessarily have thought to call her the superior debater. But she was, and the fact that people didn’t think it was another of her strengths.

In a way, Avon was braced for such surprises. Yet even so, he could hardly believe it when he learned she'd been so stupid as to never use Orac to look up Travis's record, which Avon himself, of course, monitored carefully. Soon after their abortive attack on Central Control, he learned there had been an update to that record involving information that had come out in Travis' trial--information he thought Blake might not yet be aware of. Avon had asked, out of idle curiosity, when Blake had last looked at the file.

“She has not," Orac had responded.

"What." Avon had stopped mid-pace.

"Blake has never consulted me regarding this information."

"I heard you," Avon had hissed, heading out the door.

He'd arrived at Blake's cabin to find the door open, as it often was. Blake believed in open-door leadership, when she wasn't sleeping or concocting something like the Kasabi fiasco behind their backs. Blake was sitting at her desk, chewing a pencil, staring at a topographical map of somewhere. Normally Avon would have taken note of that and tried to anticipate Blake's next move (Blake often kept her secrets in the open--you had only to work them out), but he found he was too angry for that.

"Orac has just told me something interesting," he said through a nasty smile.

Blake leaned back, putting down her pencil. She knew, it seemed, the sort of conversation this was going to be, if not, probably, what it was about.

"You have never thought to look up Travis. The man who is pursuing us, _you_ , across the galaxy. You have never _once_ attempted to figure out what his weaknesses are, to use them against him. I'd wager you don't even know his first _name_. How could even _you_ be so careless as to--"

“Oh, I have _thought_ to look up Travis," Blake said, her voice perfectly controlled. She had a way of over-riding him that Avon had never quite understood. She could speak more calmly than him, and her resonant voice could be quieter, and still she could cut him off totally, could strangle his words in his throat. "I've just never done it."

" _Why_ , Blake?"

She rolled her shoulders. "I've never needed to. There's nothing _to_ Travis, Avon."

"If he caught you, I think you'd find that what little there is will suffice to kill you."

“Oh, he'd probably rape me to death," Blake agreed, missing Avon's blanch. "It's not very interesting, really. You know I don't think he'd even have thought to do it, if I were a man. He has a very limited imagination. That's why I've never needed to look him up. Tell me, Avon, have you ever discovered anything in Travis's record we couldn't have simply guessed?"

Avon glowered at her, and Blake took her answer.

"He's a career officer, a brute, and obsessed with seeing me dead. He had a little duty and a little loyalty once, but it's all gone now. He might have been a better man, possibly. But he isn't. I don't know his first name, no. I don't care to know. It seems utterly unimportant to me. But he knows mine, and that gives me a kind of power over him."

She looked properly at Avon now, returning from the middle distance. "Anything else?"

"I still think you're making a mistake."

Blake smiled. "I gathered. Don’t you always?” Her expression drifted into something more sincere. “Thank you for your concern, Avon.”

He turned on his heel and left, and he couldn't help a treasonous thought from flickering across his consciousness. Blake knew his first name. She had used it once. She cared to know.

***

Blake charged out of the teleport bay, Avon hot on her heels.

"I am _not,_ " Avon told her back, "your champion. I don't suffer from an excess of chivalry. You cannot depend on me to come after you when you expose yourself to danger like this."

"I don't," Blake said shortly, sitting down hard on the divan in the _Liberator_ 's flight control room. Avon seemed not at all mollified, even seemed hurt, by her confirmation of his own words. Blake wondered if she should have been more precise and more honest. No, Avon certainly wasn't her champion. And actually, she did rather depend on Avon to rescue her, and any of the others, if the situation were serious. She'd yet to be proved wrong.

Blake and Avon were tired, too tired to stagger off to their rooms to sleep, as Cally and Vila had. Jenna had vacated the flight deck when the two of them had come in, having waited for relief from her shift for hours--too long not to take the slightest pretext as an excuse to leave. Even bone-exhausted shipmates would do--they'd probably man the controls better than she could, right now.

Searching for Docholi wasn't going well. Today it had landed Blake and Vila in prison. (Home sweet home, Vila had groused.) Cally, slightly faster than Orac, had manned the teleport, and Avon had come down to stun some guards and extricate his crewmates. Blake still had a whisper of the cyber-surgeon’s trail, but it was not, alas, a particularly warm trail.

"Chivalry is much maligned," Blake said, after a moment.

"You _would_ think that," Avon returned sourly.

"Why?" Blake shrugged. "I've rarely needed it. But the trouble is, people like you--" Avon laughed. "People like _you_ ," Blake continued, "don't really remember medieval romances."

"Oh. Is _that_ my problem?"

"One of them," Blake said reasonably. "You might like them. Malory is underrated. Listen - ‘Sir Bors rode straight unto Queen Guenever. And when she saw Sir Bors she wept as she were wood. Fie on your weeping, said Sir Bors de Ganis, for ye weep never but when there is no boot. Alas, said Sir Bors, that ever Sir Launcelot's kin saw you, for now have ye lost the best knight of our blood, and he that was all our leader and our succour'. Exquisitely cruel, isn't it?”

“…Why didn't you do history?" Avon said in a quiet, peaceable tone that reminded Blake that, by some definitions (which Avon would quibble with), Avon was her best friend, as well as the man she was in love with.

"They wouldn't let me. I had good engineering test scores, and the Federation wanted engineers. And no one with a high degree of independence is allowed to go into what's left of academic work, you know that." He did. Blake sighed for the loss of a fertile recruiting ground. What she'd have given for bright undergraduates.

The quote tugged at Blake. Something about it wasn't quite finished with her yet. "TH White lifts that, actually. For _Once and Future King_. That's a twentieth-century reworking of the myths—though you get a lot more out of it if you know Malory, I think. Anyway," and Avon _must_ be tired, to let her ramble like this, "in the second book, there's this queen. She starts performing a charm, to tell the future. It involves boiling a live cat. And then after she's done it, and killed the thing, she gets bored. She tips the whole mess out the window. Doesn't even bother to do something with the work. She didn't even _need_ the charm. It's such--pointless cruelty. A perfect description of a kind of awfulness."

Avon was staring out ahead of him, saying nothing, and suddenly Blake knew that Avon thought she was talking about him. That he thought she was condemning his purposeless nastiness, his endless barbs. What he didn’t know, what she hadn’t managed to convey, was that the queen in the story had been cruel because she was incapable of feeling; Avon, in contrast, was cruel because he suffered from some indecipherable excess of it. Blake had no way to reach him, to say that she hadn't meant that at all. Avon wouldn't accept anything so direct. Blake pressed on, hoping to shake the allegory.

"Then later--the queen has these sons who love her terribly. She's trying to bed some knights who've come to the castle, and she suggests they go unicorn-hunting, with her as bait. The boys hear her, and they think she actually wants a unicorn. So they go out to try and get one for her. They find it, and it's _wonderful_. And they murder it, for her. They can't bring back the whole thing, so they saw off its head. But they're just little boys, and they can't carry it easily. So they make a rope harness to drag it over rough ground, and the thing gets cut to shreds. They drag it all the way back to the castle, all for her. And when they get there, the thing's grotesque, and she's furious with them--never wanted it in the first place. There's nothing uncomplicated about love, or chivalry--nothing easy to mock and dismiss."

Blake felt not as though she'd escaped the gravity of the allegory, but like she'd managed to twist it further. It was still, for Avon, some kind of comment on what Avon had done for them, almost an accusation. Perhaps that wasn't even his egotism, or her accident. She knew she was always talking about Avon, couldn't pull away from it. He was twisted through her thoughts now like a vine threading through a ruin--breaking it up and holding it together. And Blake rarely understood what she wanted to say about Avon, to Avon. She felt she understood _him_ to a degree, but not how he felt, or how to make him stay. Her success thus far had been down to a combination of his own suppressed morality, brutal manipulation on her part, and luck. It wouldn't hold forever. She didn't know how to make it, or what would happen to her if he left. She hadn't any mortar between the stones, anymore. He'd brushed it away. Vines are brutal without meaning to be, given enough time. And there's always a risk that they'll die, and take the whole place with them.

"Thank you for the history lesson," Avon said wryly, standing up and pushing himself towards his cabin.

Blake watched him go and knew she'd watch it properly, someday. Maybe if she'd been a different person, she'd have known precisely what was needed, instead of just making a series of intelligent stabs in the dark. Maybe if they'd met differently. Maybe if he _liked_ her, the way she liked him. Maybe if she'd done history.

***

Avon was passing over the watch to Jenna, and she looked over the flight path and told him to expect turbulence. By this point, Avon had developed a Pavlovian association between turbulence and Blake. Put in mind of her thus, Avon went to repeat to Blake that Jenna had decided to push through a small asteroid field. He didn't particularly want to disturb her during her rest shift, but if he didn't, Blake would be dressed and on the flight deck, groggy and demanding to know what was going on, whether they were under attack, in something less than ten minutes. If you woke Blake up with a call, she'd come up anyway, to make _sure_. He didn’t need to bother with Vila or Cally. Vila would try to sleep through it--if he died in his sleep, well, lucky him. Cally would page up to see if there was anything she could do, and go back to bed if she couldn't help. But trouble couldn't happen within a mile of Blake without her running towards it, trying to figure out how she could involve herself in it.

He rapped on Blake's door, and it opened quickly. He was surprised to find her still up. When the door opened, he didn't immediately start speaking. And so Blake said 'come in', and Avon found he had to.

He hadn't started speaking because Blake was wearing one of the billowy shirts she wore under her waistcoats. Just that. It dipped down low enough that she was decent, but only just. Her long, curly hair was mussed from bed.

"Well?" Blake asked, raising an eyebrow. She then seemed to notice her deshabille. "Sorry, I thought it might be urgent. I didn't mean to make you uncomfortable."

Blake shrugged on a dressing gown and belted it. Avon felt his hand twitch slightly because he disliked this development, but he clamped the hand behind his back, firmly gripping it with his other, to keep this from being obvious.

"It doesn't bother me," Avon said, mouth dry. Blake gave him a strange, slightly rueful expression, and he continued. "Jenna's flying through an asteroid field. I wanted to save you the trouble of charging in to save us all. Your cabin _is_ en route to mine."

Why are you making unnecessary excuses? he asked himself. _Shut up_.

With only that warning, the ship lurched wildly. Avon toppled and so did Blake, though he managed to catch her so that she fell only on him rather than on the floor.

"Are you sure it's just an asteroid field?" Blake demanded of him, from on top of him. "That _felt_ more like a plasma--"

"She'd use the com," Avon pointed out through gritted teeth, "if it were."

Blake's dressing gown had slipped off her shoulder. Her shirt had ridden up slightly. She was, apparently, just wearing the shirt and (thank god) some simple black underwear. Blake had strong, muscular thighs and what Avon had often thought of as distractingly, obnoxiously large breasts. These were currently pressed against his chest, and it was evident that, among her many strongly-held beliefs, Blake also didn't put stock in sleeping in any kind of brassiere. Her curls tumbled down around Avon's face.

Blake shifted on him, trying to climb off. “I’ll go and see if she needs any help--"

Avon grabbed her, keeping her from bolting to the flight deck. "She doesn’t. That was the whole _point_ of my coming--"

Blake had been trying to move her hand to the floor so she could push off him. In so doing she accidentally brushed past what was undeniably an erection. Avon froze. Removed his hands from her.

"I don't think anything of it," Blake said after a moment, having snatched her hand away and sat up, kneeling, in front of him.

 _Thanks_ , Avon thought sourly. His cock throbbed pointedly. Blake had, after all, stroked it, which suggested to some poor libidinal chunk of his brain that she might at any moment do so again.

"It's just a physical reaction," Blake added brusquely, getting to her feet and adjusting her dressing gown. "It doesn't mean anything, of course."

"Easy for you to say," Avon snarled, standing himself. "Given that _you_ are not the one having it."

Blake sighed, rubbing her temples with her hand. "If it helps to know I'm not one-upping you, I find you physically attractive. There––that’s slightly more embarrassing than an automatic reaction, isn't it? _You win_. I know, given the situation, it could have happened with anyone--"

"Passing fair?" Avon snapped back, and immediately his eyes went a little wide. _Shit_.

Blake paused for a moment. "Passing fair," she murmured. "You've read Malory," Blake said, lingering on it. "It isn't a joke you'd make, if you hadn't. And you _hadn't_ , when we talked about this earlier."

Avon tried some deflection about needing, for reasons of self-preservation, to understand what was going on in Blake's mind.

Blake waved him off. She had Orac in her room, and she inserted the key.

"Orac, Avon would have to access literature databases via your interface, correct? Or at least, that is what he'd be most likely to do."

"Correct."

"And how much of _Le Morte d'Arthur_ has Avon read?" It was long. Tedious. In a form of English no one spoke anymore.

"The entirety. He has also requested--"

"Thank you, Orac." Blake removed the key to spare him. Avon stood stock still, enduing exquisite humiliation.

"Well," Blake said after a moment. " _Malory."_ She felt her heart twist with bright glee. "You're in love with me."

Avon responded with total silence.

"Do you want to do anything about it?" Blake asked.

"Do _you?_ " he shot back immediately, in a slightly venomous tone. "What do you propose we should do—talk the matter over? Decide how we are to proceed, now that you know? You do seem to have only just discovered the fact. Which means that you did not do this to me on purpose, after all.” Avon shook his head. "No. Of course you didn't. I sometimes thought you might have been merely executing a successful strategy. I thought you might even have told me as much, with that conversation. Your sense of fairness, winning out." Avon's lip twisted. “I thought that perhaps you believed I should at least know I was being used."

Blake laughed. "I've never had much in the way of wiles."

“You're serious? Blake, the better part of what you do consists of convincing people to follow you. I am deeply involved in a political rebellion. Ask _anyone_ exactly how unlikely that is."

Blake waved her hand. "That's not feminine per se; it doesn't count as wiles."

"I didn't say it was. And strange as this may seem to you, things don't stop occupying given categories simply because Roj Blake thinks they don't count."

Blake rolled her eyes and closed the distance between them. "Don't be contrary," she murmured, tilting her head up slightly. “Talking the matter over isn’t precisely what I had in mind.” She kissed him. He melted into it like it was a release and a relief, and she put her hand on the back of his head, threading it through his hair, keeping him there. He didn't seem much inclined to leave, for his part. He wrapped his hands around her waist, and she leaned into him, indicating that he could tug her closer. He did, with enthusiasm.

"I think it's sweet, that you wanted to tell me so badly it just slipped out.” Blake smiled into the kiss.

"Shut up, Blake."

"No, I mean it," and her voice rumbled into his ear as she moved to kiss his jaw, and Avon felt himself getting harder. "Did you want me to know you were in love with me? Did you want me to know you'd battled your way through _all eight books?_ I do appreciate the compliment, Avon." A man who read all of Malory for her on the hint of a wish would never leave her lightly, no matter what he said. She was safe, she could _keep_ him, if she was just careful not to push Avon past endurance. And Avon would have a right to leave her then, he'd be free to do it. But now she knew he didn't _want_ to go. She could enjoy him. Brilliant, wildly romantic and utterly-unwilling-to-admit-anything-of-the-kind Avon. She cupped his cock in her hand through his trousers. "Is there anything else you'd like to do for me?"

Avon shuddered in her arms. "Oh god, yes."

Blake slid out her robe and sat on her bed, the asteroid field forgotten, pulling Avon down with her. He didn't seem anything like as tired as he might be expected to be, having just come off shift. He started mouthing Blake's breast through the fabric of her shirt and rubbing her through her underwear, fingers shaking a little with urgency. Blake shifted, pulling off her shirt, and he didn't let her back hit the mattress again before he was on her, licking her neck, palming her breasts. His eyes had gone pleasingly glassy, and Blake could feel the shortness of her own breath, the juddering quickness of her own pulse.

"Let me go down on you," he asked rather breathlessly. Blake frowned. She didn't usually go in for that.

"Is that what you want?"

Avon looked a little worried. "Do you--dislike it?"

"No, it just--doesn't feel very egalitarian, for a first time. I want you to enjoy me, and to get as much as I do out of this."

"I wouldn't worry about that," Avon said flatly, though she'd seen him swallow at the words 'enjoy me'.

Blake rolled her eyes. "Telling me not to consider whether _you'll_ like what we do in bed is more than a little--"

"Almost since I met you, this is what I've wanted to do to you. It's probably what I've given most thought to, and what I've wanted the most." Avon stared at her intently, and it was--affecting.

She blinked at him. " _Really?_ "

Avon rolled his eyes. "No, Blake, this is an elaborate deception."

“Well—if you really want it." Blake was finding how much Avon seemed to want to do this to her incredibly arousing in its own right. Avon could have any predilections he liked, if he was going to sit there looking undone by lust. Blake was fairly sure she'd enjoy anything that made Avon that happy.

Avon smiled like he'd just devastatingly won an argument. He could be stupidly handsome sometimes.

What Blake disliked about oral sex wasn't so much the sensation, but that she didn't feel she was seeing to the other person properly for the duration, and that people often didn't seem--enthused. Blake often felt she was taking too long, or that they should be getting on to other things. She liked going down on men and women herself, and had something of an oral fixation. But she generally found it easier to give than to receive. You were in charge, for one.

Blake rapidly discovered that these criticism didn't really apply to Avon, who treated being allowed to lick her out like he'd just won some kind of achievement award, like it was _his_ erotic experience. There was also something especially good in being naked when he was fully clothed in some ridiculous black leather _thing_ , in the way he slid down the bed and gripped her thighs and applied himself diligently. Blake couldn't quite bring herself to be embarrassed that he'd find her very ready--if Avon didn't know by now that she was injudiciously attracted to him, he wouldn't be able to stay ignorant for long. He made a noise when Blake fisted her hand in his hair.

"That's good, Avon," she murmured, and she could hear his breath catch. It made her own chest tighten.

And it was. Blake wouldn't have thought to list 'enthusiastic', 'methodical' and 'sex act' in any one sentence, which apparently only spoke to the fact that she hadn't yet had sex with Avon, who studied her like he was preparing a report on the subject and simultaneously worked as though he was greedy, starving. Blake let herself respond noisily, and he looked up at her for a moment with a kind of dazed, wild gratitude for it. He slid fingers into her, flickering them fast and then adding more and going slower. He was _good_. He was good because he wanted to be good, so badly, and he worked for it, responding to her slight shifts of position with immediate adjustment or persistence, as the case demanded. She nudged him and he followed, for once in his life. He pressed and swept her clitoris with his mouth, back and forth. Blake came on the low, demanding drag and fullness of his fingers, on the delicate edged flick of his tongue.

Weakly, she pulled him up, and he groaned a little as she dragged him into a loose kiss that tasted of her. Offered permission by her response, he pushed his tongue into her mouth, an echo of what he'd just done to her cunt, and she felt herself clench around his fingers, still inside her. He slid them out slowly, as though every flutter of her body and hitch of her breath made him want to do it again.

"I don't normally enjoy that," she told him.

He stiffened slightly, as though afraid he was being critiqued, and his face took on the defensive quality she knew so well. "We--"

“No, not normally, but I _love_ it when you do it." Blake caught his face in her hands. "I've never come from it before." That had apparently been either the right or the wrong thing to say, given his spreading grin. "Stop looking so pleased with yourself." Perhaps she shouldn't have mentioned it. She would have to distract him, simply so that he didn't keep looking at her like that--with that combination of boyish pleasure and utter smugness and something like awe. It pushed her heart into her throat and she couldn't bear it long. She handed him a tissue. There, that should do it.

"What else do you want? In a general sense."

Avon shrugged. "The reverse, of course. Your propensity for chewing your fingers could hardly fail to inspire some thinking along those lines."

"Now?"

He hesitated. "No. Now I'd like to fuck you. If that is at all possible."

“All right. Don’t be disappointed if I don’t come again—I know from experience that I generally can’t without more of a break. But I _will_ enjoy it.” Blake brought Avon’s hand to her mouth in a quick kiss. "Would you like to lie down and let me do the work, or the reverse?"

"I'll do it," Avon said quite quickly. Blake raised an eyebrow.

"Your initial suggestion appeals," he admitted. "And I would like a rain-check. However, since I've just…"

Blake put it together. "Your ideal fantasy--the one you've worked over in your mind until it's perfect--involves making me come with your mouth and then fucking me stupid, does it? Headboard-banging, breasts bouncing, moaning 'oh Avon', the lot."

"I never claimed to be subtle about you," Avon said unapologetically.

"I never claimed to like subtlety," Blake countered.

She didn't normally come twice--but then it was a special occasion, and Avon did seem to claim rather a lot of special exemptions from her rules.

***

Servalan briefed the new case-psychostrategist efficiently, not least because she had done this before and had most of the key points memorized by now. This was the fifth strategist. At least. There might well have been more of them assigned to the Blake case, in the early days before Servalan had begun taking such a keen interest. The whole affair had stretched on for years now, and rumor had it Blake's people were getting ready for a serious strategic assault. The least Servalan could do was brief these fools personally, and pray one of them finally provided her with a means of taking care of the problem. She put away Roj Blake's dossier and passed over the next.

"Kerr Avon, her lover. Don't be fooled by any appearance of division within the ranks, and certainly don't be fooled by any amount of flirting--he's unswervingly devoted to Blake. He’s also one of the foremost computer experts in the galaxy. He started out completely apolitical, and her effect on him resembles deep conditioning. Your predecessor entertained an amusing but limited theory that he thinks of her as some sort of queen or goddess. The fact remains that there's almost nothing he'd stop at, for her. The only successes we've ever had manipulating him are by capturing Blake--who is a difficult woman to capture--and when they were separated after the invasion, by convincing him that Blake was dead. That of course broke down in the botched Gauda Prime sabotage three years ago." Servalan indicated a few images they had obtained from the base's own surveillance equipment. "It isn't likely to work again. Everyone else in Blake’s operation is a high-priority threat, but these two are our primary targets, and exploiting their weaknesses is your paramount goal."

The psychostrategist plucked out an image. Avon, fallen to his knees in front of Blake, Blake's hand in his hair, looking down at him with her eerie charismatic intensity.

"After Leighton," she murmured.

"Excuse me?" Servalan asked.

"Nothing, it just looks like an Aesthetic Movement painting," the strategist commented, taking it in. "Him in black, her hair down, you can't even see that wound she took. Do you think they staged the composition, for PR?"

Servalan told her off sharply for romanticizing terrorists and set the strategist to her work, in full expectation of having to have the same conversation with a sixth and seventh version of the woman--provided, of course, that whatever Blake was planning didn't spare her the necessity.


End file.
